Frequencies long ago set aside for education—but since gobbled up by business—could help close the “homework gap.”

Zach Leverenz speaking to students at New York City middle school MS 258 during the New York launch of EveryoneOn, in June 2014. Photo: Clay Williams

Shortly before 1 a.m. on February 23, 2016, an incendiary email landed on a nonprofit listserv, blasting a federal program that many of the listserv’s members rely on to bring high-speed internet to low-income and rural Americans.

The message, from Zach Leverenz, founder of the nonprofit EveryoneOn, attacked the Educational Broadband Service (EBS), which long ago granted school districts and education nonprofits thousands of free licenses to use a slice of spectrum — the range of frequencies that carry everything from radio to GPS navigation to mobile internet. Leverenz denounced EBS as a “scam that must be reformed.”

While this late-night call to arms was unusual, Leverenz wasn’t the first to level such accusations. In recent years, a small chorus of advocates and policy wonks have pointed out that most EBS license holders don’t actually use their free spectrum. Instead, these schools and nonprofits lease their licenses to commercial internet providers for cash (and free accounts) in secret deals. Meanwhile, millions of American students trek to public libraries and fast-food restaurants to get online after school, or they go without — a problem known as the “homework gap.”

“This asset was handed to [school districts and educational nonprofits] with the expectation that they deliver educational and social value in return. I see very little of that,” Leverenz said in an interview.

Leverenz and other critics have singled out two educational nonprofits — Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen — both of which rake in millions of dollars a year from their national holdings of EBS licenses, while using just a fraction of the revenue to supply much-needed broadband access to students.

“This issue [the ‘homework gap’] constitutes a new civil right: the right to digital equity.”

The Consortium for School Networking

In their defense, Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen point out that they do more than most to support digital inclusion. In addition to their cash royalties, they use their bargaining power to get tens of thousands of free educational accounts on commercial networks that they pass on at low-cost to students and other worthy recipients, whom they also support monetarily through charitable donations and grants to other nonprofits.

Yet, the fact remains that too many students still scrounge for the vital internet access their classmates (and technology-enamored school reformers) take for granted. Dozens of interviews — along with reviews of tax disclosures, Federal Communications Commission filings, and court records related to EBS — show that this educational spectrum is, at least, woefully underutilized — a public resource born of good intentions but wasted by a broken system.

***

In 2004, President George W. Bush called for universal broadband access in America by 2007. A decade after that deadline, 34 million Americans still lack broadband access, according to the FCC. A 2015 Pew Research Center report revealed that the disconnected included 5 million households with school-aged children, who either couldn’t afford home broadband or lived in rural areas avoided by for-profit internet companies.

Home broadband is increasingly a must-have for education. When students lack high-speed internet outside of school walls, the vast digital resources that promise to bridge opportunity gaps — the online tutorials, the distance learning, the troves of data and the instant feedback from teachers, mentors and peers — widen those gaps instead.

“This issue constitutes a new civil right: the right to digital equity,” concluded a June 2017 report on the “homework gap” from the Consortium for School Networking.

Angela Siefer, director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), whose listserv Leverenz e-blasted, said the “homework gap” is so stubborn because every fix thus far has been “piecemeal.” Could a more robust use of EBS spectrum be the solution? Siefer isn’t sure. It would be “a bit of an experiment,” she said. “But that’s great. We need more experiments to solve this problem, because clearly the free market has not solved it.”

With a broadband need this big and intractable, why have most people never heard of spectrum set aside for educational use? According to EBS critic J. H. Snider, founder of iSolon.org, a nonprofit promoting technology for democratic reform, it starts with ignorance of spectrum itself. Spectrum is an immensely valuable public resource, but it’s also technical and invisible, and therefore easy to ignore.

“Spectrum can seem almost magical,” Snider said. “But if you could see all the information flying around you — from radar to satellite communications to the conversations on social media — it would be unbelievable.”

The EBS slice of spectrum is further obscured by a history that actually predates the internet. It started with Sputnik, the Soviet satellite program that sparked a big push to modernize American education in the late 1950s and early 60s. As part of that effort, in 1963, the FCC dedicated a portion of spectrum to spur teaching via TV, dubbing the range of frequencies ITFS (Instructional Television Fixed Service). Over the following decades, the feds gave away thousands of ITFS licenses to schools and to nonprofits that had at least a tenuous connection to education.

Then, in 2004, the FCC changed the allowed use of the educational spectrum from TV to internet, and ITFS became EBS. The commissioners reiterated the spectrum’s public purpose in their written introduction to the switch from broadcast TV to internet use. They stressed the enhanced educational potential of EBS, including the need to help bridge the digital divide: “By these actions,” they wrote, “we make significant progress towards the goal of providing all Americans with access to ubiquitous wireless broadband connections, regardless of their location.”

At the same time, opening the frequencies to internet use caused the underlying value of EBS spectrum to skyrocket. And now the market worth of these licenses mattered a great deal because, since the 1980s, the FCC had allowed license holders to lease up to 95 percent of their spectrum to commercial operators. That allowance — initially spurred by the sluggish use of instructional TV — continued even as the spectrum and its educational stewards hurtled into the booming internet era.

“We need more experiments to solve this problem, because clearly the free market has not solved it.”

Angela Siefer, director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, on the homework gap

Suddenly, commercial internet providers, notably Clearwire (later bought by Sprint), were offering school districts and nonprofits big bucks to take control of the spectrum licenses many districts scarcely knew they had.

“Licensees got blindsided by a bunch of money,” said Kevin Walker, founder and president of Project Appleseed, a nonprofit that fosters family engagement with schools, and a former board member of the Innovative Technology Education Fund (ITEF), a St. Louis-based EBS license holder. Recalling ITEF’s decision to lease its spectrum rather than use it, Walker said, “we weren’t sophisticated enough.”

Indeed, while several pioneering districts have recently found ways to use EBS spectrum for their own broadband networks, and to connect students off campus (see our earlier story about Albemarle County, Virginia) through lower-cost network hardware and partnerships with local municipalities, such a project would have overwhelmed most license holders a decade ago.

“It would have seemed like building a rocket ship to the moon,” said Steve Rovarino, president of Red Rover, a business that helps school districts (and larger clients) create broadband networks.

As a result, about 90 percent of the approximately 2400 EBS licenses have been leased to some extent, and the bulk are leased for 30 years, according to the national association of EBS license holders.

The details of these leases are secret, cloaked by nondisclosure agreements. But the few contracts that have leaked into the public domain, through court proceedings and interviews with lawyers who negotiated the leases, indicate that annual cash payments range from tens of thousands of dollars for a rural license to millions of dollars for spectrum in a major city.

Meanwhile, the two main regulations meant to tether leased spectrum to its intended educational use — a rule that 5 percent of spectrum must be held back from a lease and a requirement for 20 hours of educational use per week — were crafted for TV broadcasts and make very little sense for the internet.

Five percent of the typical EBS spectrum allotment is too small to be useful for broadband. Likewise, while 20 hours of television programming is easy to track, it’s unclear what it means to use a broadband network for 20 hours. Are students using the internet while they are logged on to a school’s learning management system or the entire time they’re reading an online document, or only when downloading something or clicking to a new page?

***

A central issue when granting private use of a public resource is assessing the public benefit. School districts presumably put spectrum payments to good use. But, whether the EBS license holder is a school or a nonprofit, the secrecy of lease contracts makes it impossible to tabulate the public good gained from giving spectrum licenses to schools and educational nonprofits to begin with — spectrum that’s valued as high as $75 billion.

While most EBS license holders control just one or two licenses, a few nonprofits — including the two groups targeted by Leverenz, Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen — have amassed a national network of spectrum over the years.

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Mobile Beacon is an offshoot of the North American Catholic Education Programming Foundation (NACEPF), which gathered its 52 spectrum licenses in the late 1980s and early 1990s to deliver a range of instructional and religious TV programming to schools. Mobile Citizen is a division of Voqal, a network of five nonprofits that likewise accumulated a nationwide holding of 11 spectrum licenses to broadcast free educational television to schools.

Shortly after the EBS conversion, in 2006, the two nonprofit groups jointly signed a 30-year lease of their spectrum with Clearwire/Sprint in return for cash payments and “free educational accounts” with unlimited data on the commercial network. As usual, the terms are confidential, but 990 tax forms show several millions of dollars in annual royalty payments to both entities. And court records reveal a combined allotment of around 70,000 free accounts, which Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen typically pass on for $10 per month to low-income people. The end users of these accounts include not only students, but also seniors, the disabled and others served by a variety of nonprofits, such as PCs for People, College Unbound and Feeding America, with whom Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen partner and split the fees.

Mobile hotspots that can connect a whole household’s devices are often provided with the low-cost accounts, so the number of people helped likely stretches into the hundreds of thousands.

Leverenz questions why the EBS license holders should turn “free educational accounts” into a revenue stream, but the more salient issue for him is how the nonprofits use the millions of dollars in spectrum royalties at a time when millions of American students still struggle to get online outside of school walls.

$75 billion — the value some experts placed on the electromagnetic spectrum given to school districts and education nonprofits.

“Think about the amount of pure lease payments they receive for this public asset they don’t own, which they’ve been given to steward,” said Leverenz of NACEPF and Voqal, the parent organizations of Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen.

Reviews of NACEPF tax disclosures from the three most-recent years available (2013-2015) show average annual revenue of about $8.2 million, and nearly all of that money is from EBS spectrum leases. But, over that span, NACEPF devoted just 17 percent of its revenue to providing broadband.

The nonprofit also spent a few hundred thousand dollars a year on charitable donations and grants to a range of churches, overseas religious missions, schools, libraries and educational groups. Since 2013, a portion of that charity money has gone to running a 150-acre farm near the NACEPF headquarters in Johnston, Rhode Island, which donates its crops to homeless shelters.

Zach Leverenz discussing digital equity and Educational Broadband Service (EBS) at a gathering of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America Foundation, in February 2016. Photo courtesy of New America Foundation

Katherine Messier, executive director of Mobile Beacon, said her organization wants to use its EBS licenses not only to provide internet access to families with school-aged kids, but to enable “lifelong learning” as well. “Addressing the homework gap is a very noble goal and one we’re involved with, too,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean that people living in poverty without children, or seniors, or disabled populations don’t need the same access.”

However, most of NACEPF’s EBS money, a whopping 76 percent of their annual revenue over the three years examined, didn’t go to any causes whatsoever. Instead, most of that money was plowed into savings and investments totaling about $50 million as of 2015.

While there’s nothing illegal about a nonprofit squirreling away three-quarters of its money, guidelines by the Better Business Bureau and the Charities Review Council say that groups spending less than 70 percent of their revenue on mission-directed expenses need a very good reason. Messier claims she has one — insurance.

“If our lessee did not fulfill its obligations, or there was some kind of dispute that stopped us from being able to provide service, we need to be prepared to go out and create that network, and use our spectrum to do that,” said Messier. “Even with the capital we have, we still wouldn’t be able to fully replicate the current network in terms of service. But we need to be prepared.”

Like NACEPF, the five Voqal nonprofits behind Mobile Citizen get most of their revenue, $6 to $7 million a year, from spectrum cash royalties and from fees they charge for the free educational accounts they get in their deal with Sprint. While the Voqal nonprofits do put the bulk of their money into mission-directed expenses — nearly three quarters of total EBS revenue on average from 2013 to 2015 — supplying broadband service accounted for only about 20 percent of that spending.

About 10 percent of the spending went to the educational television Voqal still provides. But nearly 70 percent of the spending went to grants and donations to an array of education, media, and social-justice causes, plus contributions to progressive political groups such as Common Cause and the Proteus Action League, which puts money into ballot initiative campaigns about everything from campaign finance to the death penalty.

“Whether or not you think nonprofits should be investing in political causes, they’re still not doing enough with this public asset they’ve been given to steward,” Leverenz said of Voqal. Snider, of iSolon, said that, by making such wide-ranging use of EBS royalties, Voqal is acting as if the spectrum belongs to them when it doesn’t. He notes that the law “is very clear that the licenses belong to the public. The license holders would love to pretend otherwise, but it just isn’t so.”

Answering questions by email, Voqal’s president and CEO, John Schwartz, replied, “Our programs are often aimed at the root causes that bar access to knowledge. … To use the resources afforded to us by our contracts only to provide free accounts and thus make a larger dent in the digital divide wouldn’t address the issues that create the divide in the first place.”

There are lots of ideas for fixing EBS. Snider of iSolon said the FCC could reclaim leased EBS licenses when they expire and reallocate them, although he can’t imagine them taking such a bold step. The FCC could also issue new spectrum licenses for the rural areas not yet covered by EBS, under the condition that license holders use the spectrum for public purposes rather than lease it. The national association of EBS license holders sent the FCC a proposal along these lines in 2014, but the agency has not formally responded. (The FCC also did not respond to five requests, by email and by phone, over several weeks, seeking comment on this story.)

“We’re looking at a public asset, assigned to do public good. How can we get it to work for its intended purpose?”

Zach Leverenz, an advocate for closing the digital divide, on the use of electromagnetic spectrum set aside for education

As for the current leases that dominate EBS, Leverenz said that the FCC could do a lot to “correct the shadiness in the system” just by clarifying the vagueness of legacy rules tying EBS to its original mission — such as defining what 20 hours per week of educational use means and ensuring that the 5 percent of spectrum “reserved” from the leases is actually used for educational purposes.

In fact, Voqal petitioned the FCC to update and strengthen those two requirements, calling them “convoluted” and “murky, at best” in a 2015 filing that alleged “EBS is not currently living up to its envisioned potential as a force in the development and support of education.”

The FCC has repeatedly declined to strengthen, clarify or update these rules, replying to one such petition by writing that “the best course is to rely on the good faith efforts of EBS licensees to meet these requirements.”

Perhaps the most straightforward EBS reform would be the one with which Leverenz concluded his scathing email blast to NDIA members — “We must demand EBS spectrum transparency now.” As long as the majority of EBS spectrum is tied up in long-term leases, he argued, the public deserves a full account of the educational and social benefits produced in exchange.

“We’re looking at a public asset, assigned to do public good,” he said. “How can we get it to work for its intended purpose? How can we bring it out from the shadows? We need to create accountability.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, the nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

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Chris Berdik is a science journalist who has written about a wide variety of topics, including the intersection of science with ethical issues and the… See Archive

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The recent article, A Hidden Public Internet Asset That Could Get More Kids Online for Learning, (dated July 10, 2017) did not provide a balanced perspective on Educational Broadband Service (EBS) use nationally. The article did not properly identify the educational achievements and public services being provided through the use of this spectrum.

While educational technology and serving diverse audiences can certainly foster strong feelings; starting off a report with an incendiary quote that EBS is "a scam that must be reformed" sets the tone that provides what we believe to be an inaccurate account of EBS and its value to education in this country.

While the article focused on two or three non profit organizations, it left out a great deal of perspective. What was missing were quotes from the National EBS Association (NEBSA) the membership organization that represents EBS users who spoke with the reporter. Also receiving sparse attention were the many EBS licensees including: K-12 school districts, colleges, universities and state networks that provide important online educational services nationwide helping to bridge the digital divide.

There is much to discuss as we all deal with changing parameters, digital innovations and applications. NEBSA and the EBS community welcome the chance to have an informed and balanced conversation.

Lee Solonche,

Executive Director, NEBSA

- from Lee Solonche, Jul 21, 2017

To whom it may concern,

I am writing in response to the article, “A hidden, public internet asset that could get more kids online for learning” published on July 10, 2017.

While we agree that the need for home internet access is critical to provide every student a quality education, we disagree with the assertions that EBS license holders who lease their spectrum to commercial providers “don’t actually use their spectrum.” In fact, our direct experience shows the opposite is true.

As the article points out, through our lease agreements, Mobile Beacon provides tens of thousands of unlimited, 4G LTE internet connections to schools, libraries, nonprofits, and other community anchor institutions (CAIs), which impacts hundreds of thousands of Americans. Far from underutilizing our spectrum, these lease agreements have maximized the deployment of educational broadband service not only in our 52 licensed markets (including 24 rural markets), but in communities across every state in the US.

We recently published two research reports that demonstrate our service not only effectively addresses the homework gap, but continues to support lifelong educational opportunities for Americans of all ages and family types. Some key findings include:

• 42% of schools say the main benefit of Mobile Beacon’s service is to supplement their existing internet connection. Overall, Mobile Beacon’s school clients use a staggering 373 GB of data per month, which speaks to our ability to meet their need for additional capacity to facilitate learning in the classroom.

• Hotspot lending programs, which specifically address closing the digital divide and homework gap in communities, are provided by each of Mobile Beacon’s client categories (schools, libraries, and nonprofits). In fact, we pioneered the library hotspot lending model, which gained national attention when we helped New York Public Library launch the largest hotspot lending program that’s been done in the U.S. to-date, and now supports over 350 library systems across the country.

• 24% of adults below the 200% poverty level started taking a daily or weekly online class after signing up for our service. Our service is made available to low income families and individuals through our nonprofit partner, PCs for People, an organization focused on closing the digital divide. This is significant as low-income adults often find it difficult to accommodate traditional college schedules, or afford typical tuition rates.

• 95% of low-income parents who received our service through a nonprofit organization have reported that the service has helped them better support their child’s education. 88% have used it to research their child’s homework topics, 44% have used it to research colleges and financial aid opportunities, and 94% said our service enabled them to communicate with their child’s teacher more frequently.

The article also questions the monetary capital NACEPF has reserved. We are careful stewards of the spectrum we have been licensed and we are deeply committed to our educational and nonprofit clients. The capital is to ensure we could provide broadband service in the absence of relying on our commercial lessee’s network. We reiterate this is not simply a theoretical risk. In the past six years alone, we have started this process twice when it appeared we would not be able to secure the appropriate level of service from our lessee for the schools and nonprofits we serve.

We believe in the power of CAIs working together to close the digital divide. We’ve been part of this important work in communities across the United States, and we’re not slowing down. We’re proud of the contributions we’ve made to support education at all levels, and we respectfully suggest there are important “lessons learned” from the good work that’s been done by EBS licensees that lease their spectrum, as well as those who have built their own networks.

Sincerely,

Katherine Messier

Founder and Executive Director, Mobile Beacon and Director, NACEPF

- from Katherine Messier, Jul 24, 2017

Dear Editor:

Chris Berdik did an excellent job writing about Educational Broadband Service (EBS) in "Schools Tap Secret Spectrum to Beam Free Internet to Students" and "As the Digital Divide Grows, an Untapped Solution Languishes". He made a complicated problem simple to understand and he provided a balanced view about the underutilization of a powerful public asset.

I lead a national organization that advocates for family engagement in public schools. In 2001 the Attorney General of Missouri appointed me to the board of directors of a nonprofit foundation which holds a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) EBS license in St. Louis. I served on the board and advisory board for 16 years.

Unfortunately the foundation has never used its EBS license to build broadband infrastructure for the underserved in St. Louis. The vast majority of our lease payments are invested in stocks and bonds - not broadband for struggling schools, families or students. Instead of investing in broadband infrastructure, the foundation avoids broadband beyond the substantial use requirements and a small grants. The foundation awards grants in STEM education and teacher professional development. That funding primarily serves wealthy schools with few students of color.

The FCC and its Chairman Ajit Pai, continue to give lip service to America's parents about the need for broadband, inclusion and filling the homework gap. In his "Digital Empowerment Agenda" Mr. Pai says:

"My friend David Honig, President Emeritus of the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council, has called the failure to build out broadband infrastructure to some neighborhoods on the same terms as others “digital redlining.” The consequences of leaving low-income communities behind has serious consequences. It impedes economic development and professional opportunities (imagine having to apply for a job that only takes online applications). It reduces educational options for the students who live there. And it makes it harder for people to stay connected with the wider world around them."

America's struggling families have been digitally redlined. EBS is not producing broadband for education and the FCC won't support Lifeline expansion. It has ignored the underutilization of EBS at a time when we have families in need. Where do America's schools and families, urban and rural, go to get connected?

The FCC should support using the Educational Broadband Service to provide service to underserved areas. The Commission should consider how the Educational Broadband Service (EBS) might further broadband adoption and digital inclusion goals. The FCC can reform EBS and require EBS licensees to provide detailed transparency information.

Chris Berdik's articles serve as a base of knowledge that did not exist for parents and the public previously. We can't have a secret source of broadband that only includes corporations and excludes families and students. On behalf of parents who NEED this public asset - thank you WIRED!

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